MoMA.org | Film Exhibitions | 2005 | George Stevens: A Centenary Tribute

George Stevens: A Centennial Tribute
February 17–March 6, 2005

This centenary tribute to George Stevens (1904–1975), a meticulous craftsman and an uncommonly sensitive director of actors, presents newly restored or newly struck prints of eleven features, as well as other special programs. An assistant cameraman at seventeen, Stevens became a principal photographer and gag man for Hal Roach and Laurel and Hardy comedies within three years. His breakthrough directorial effort, Alice Adams (1935; introduced on February 17 by playwright John Guare), features Katharine Hepburn at her best, as a small-town girl on the wrong side of the tracks. Throughout his career, Stevens hewed to this theme of class aspiration and the American Dream deferred, portraying solitary outsiders in films like Giant, Shane, and A Place in the Sun. Some critics, recognizing a darkling aspect to the films Stevens made after World War II, attributed this to the horrors he witnessed and documented on 16mm color film as head of the Signal Corps Special Motion Picture Unit in Europe. As Jean-Luc Godard chillingly observed, "If George Stevens hadn’t used the first 16mm color film in Dachau, Elizabeth Taylor would never have found a place in the sun."

Organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Media. Special thanks to George Stevens, Jr., Dottie McCarthy, Randy Haberkamp (Director of Educational Programs, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), Tom Toth, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures.

Alice Adams. 1935. USA. Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by Dorothy Yost, Mortimer Offner, Jane Murfin.With Katharine Hepburn, Fred MacMurray, Hattie McDaniel. In one of her most endearing performances, Hepburn plays the quintessential American heroine: a socially awkward but imaginative young woman who ventures into the treacherous waters of high society. Based on Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer-Prize–winning novel of Midwestern snobbery, Alice Adams was a breakthrough success for the thirty-year-old Stevens. 99 min.
Thursday, February 17, 6:30 (introduced by playwright John Guare); Saturday, February 26, 4:00. T1

A Place in the Sun. 1951. USA. Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by Michael Wilson, Harry Brown.With Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters. Awarded a passel of Oscars, including Best Director, this adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy established Stevens as one of the preeminent stylists of postwar cinema. A beautifully dark tale of love and death, in which a factory worker’s longings for an heiress are impeded by a pregnant mill girl. 122 min.
Friday, February 18, 5:30; Saturday, February 26, 8:15. T1

Giant. 1956. USA. Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by Fred Guiol, Ivan Moffat.With Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean. Stevens won his second Oscar for Best Director with this adaptation of Edna Ferber’s epic novel of Texas ranch life. The film centers on two men who strive for Taylor’s love: her husband, a cattle baron, and a ranch hand who becomes an oil magnate. 201 min.
Friday, February 18, 7:45; Sunday, February 27, 4:30. T1

The Talk of the Town. 1942. USA. Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by Irwin Shaw, Sidney Buchman.With Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Ronald Colman. A union firebrand in a corrupt mill town is arrested on false charges of murder and arson. After breaking out of prison, he takes refuge in the home of an unsuspecting, stiff-lipped law professor and a scatterbrained landlady. Stevens adroitly leavens the film’s underlying theme of fair-minded justice with expert screwball touches. Restored by MoMA. 118 min.
Saturday, February 19, 2:00. T1

The More the Merrier. 1943. USA. Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by Richard Flournoy, Lewis R. Foster, Frank Ross, Robert Russell.With Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, Charles Coburn. A housing shortage in wartime Washington compels a government girl to reluctantly rent half of her cramped apartment to an old codger, who in turn sublets half of his half to a handsome bachelor. The strange bedfellows get into one jam after another in this late screwball comedy, restored by MoMA. 104 min.
Saturday, February 19, 5:00. T1

Woman of the Year. 1942. USA. Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr., Michael Kanin.With Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Fay Bainter. Hepburn engineered the making of this film by persuading Stevens to break his contract with Columbia and to cast Tracy. An acid-tongued sportswriter meets his match in a tough, idealistic political columnist, but baseball reconciles the warring sexes. 112 min.
Saturday, February 19, 8:00; Friday, February 25, 6:00. T1

Swing Time. 1936. USA. Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by Howard Lindsay, Allan Scott.With Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers. A transcendent dance musical featuring a sterling score by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields ("A Fine Romance," "The Way You Look Tonight"). Astaire and Rogers are the very definition of Deco elegance as they glide through "Never Gonna Dance," which Stevens gracefully filmed in long shots with a minimum of cuts. 103 min.
Sunday, February 20, 2:00; Monday, February 21, 6:00. T1

A Damsel in Distress. 1937. USA. Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by P. G.Wodehouse, Ernest Pagano, S. K. Lauren. With Fred Astaire, Joan Fontaine. An American dancing Lothario courts an English heiress. This sparkling follow-up to Swing Time boasts great Gershwin numbers; a supporting cast headed by George Burns, Gracie Allen, Reginald Gardiner, and Constance Collier; and Astaire in the marvelous "Fun House" sequence, which won choreographer Hermes Pan an Oscar. Restored by MoMA. 101 min.
Monday, February 21, 8:00; Saturday, February 26, 6:15. T1

George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey. 1985. USA. Written and directed by George Stevens, Jr. An illuminating portrait of a staunchly independent and versatile filmmaker from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Featured is the extraordinary 16mm color footage Stevens shot during World War II of the Normandy invasion, the liberation of Paris, and the opening of the Dachau concentration camps. Also included are film clips and interviews with some of Stevens’s collaborators, including Katharine Hepburn,Warren Beatty, John Huston, and Fred Astaire. 111 min.
Thursday, February 24, 6:00. T2

Looking for Sally. 1925. USA. Directed by Leo McCarey. Cinematography by George Stevens, Len Powers.With Charlie Chase, Katherine Grant. Jimmie Jump tries to meet cute with his long-lost flame Sally, but has a hard time finding her amid the throngs of pretty girls. Approx. 20 min.

Big Business. 1929. USA. Directed by James W. Horne. Cinematography by Stevens. Christmas tree salesmen Laurel and Hardy do battle with a stubborn customer, leading, inevitably, to mutually assured destruction. 20 min.

Brats. 1930. USA. Directed by James Parrott. Cinematography by Stevens. An ingenious two-reeler in which Laurel and Hardy play both their infantile selves and their own uncontrollable sons. 20 min.

Air-Tight. 1931. USA. Directed by George Stevens.With Mickey Daniels, Grady Sutton. A standout in the popular Boy Friends series: a runaway glider spells disaster for the sissified Sutton. 17 min.

Grin and Bear It. 1933. USA. Directed by George Stevens. From RKO’s Mr. Average Man domestic comedies, starring ''Slow Burn" Edgar Kennedy and a dog. 20 min. Program approx. 100 min.
Thursday, February 24, 8:15. T2; Saturday, February 26, 2:00. T1

I Remember Mama. 1948. USA. Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen, based on the play by John Van Druten.With Irene Dunne, Barbara Bel Geddes, Oskar Homolka. Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), and Stevens’s I Remember Mama form a trinity of postwar family dramas whose genuinely moving nostalgic sentiment soothed war-weary audiences. In I Remember Mama, a budding novelist recalls her girlhood in a Norwegian immigrant family in turn-of-the-century San Francisco. 134 min.
Friday, February 25, 8:15. T1

Shane. 1953. USA. Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.With Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Brandon De Wilde. An archetypal Western about a mysterious gunfighter who protects a group of Wyoming homesteaders from the assaults of a cattle baron. In portraying the violence through the eyes of an impressionable young boy, Stevens wanted to show that "if you point a .45 at a man and pull the trigger, you destroy an upright figure." 118 min.
Sunday, February 27, 2:00. T1

George Stevens: D-Day to Berlin. 1994. USA. Directed by George Stevens, Jr. Winner of three Emmys, this collection of color footage of World War II is the most comprehensive ever assembled. At the behest of General Eisenhower, George Stevens organized a team of Hollywood luminaries including William Saroyan, Irwin Shaw, and Ivan Moffat—later to become known as “The Stevens Irregulars”—who, with Stevens himself behind the camera, documented the war’s most significant events. 50 min.

Wednesday, March 2, 6:00 (introduced by George Stevens, Jr.); Saturday, March 5, 5:00. T2

Wednesday, March 2, 7:15 (introduced by George Stevens, Jr.). T2

Shane. 1953. USA. Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by A. B. Guthrie, Jr. With Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Brandon De Wilde. An archetypal Western about a mysterious gunfighter who protects a group of Wyoming homesteaders from the assaults of a cattle baron. In portraying the violence through the eyes of an impressionable young boy, Stevens wanted to show that “if you point a .45 at a man and pull the trigger, you destroy an upright figure.” 118 min.

Thursday, March 3, 5:00. T1

Vivacious Lady. 1938. USA. Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by P. J.Wolfson, Ernest Pagano. With James Stewart, Ginger Rogers, Beulah Bondi. College professor Stewart and nightclub performer Rogers have a hard time consummating their new marriage, and Stewart has an even harder time revealing his choice of bride to his fiancée and upper-crust family back home. A screwball comedy in which Stevens ever so gently pricks pretension, snobbery, and the institution of marriage itself. 90 min.

Thursday, March 3, 8:30; Sunday, March 6, 5:00. T2

The More the Merrier. 1943. USA. Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by Richard Flournoy, Lewis R. Foster, Frank Ross, Robert Russell. With Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, Charles Coburn. A housing shortage in wartime Washington compels a government girl to reluctantly rent half of her cramped apartment to an old codger, who in turn sublets half of his half to a handsome bachelor. The strange bedfellows get into one jam after another in this late screwball comedy, restored by MoMA. 104 min.

Friday, March 4, 8:00. T1

I Remember Mama. 1948. USA. Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen, based on the play by John Van Druten. With Irene Dunne, Barbara Bel Geddes, Oskar Homolka. Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), and Stevens’s I Remember Mama form a trinity of postwar family dramas whose genuinely moving nostalgic sentiment soothed war-weary audiences. In I Remember Mama, a budding novelist recalls her girlhood in a Norwegian immigrant family in turn-of-the-century San Francisco. 134 min.

Saturday, March 5, 2:00. T1

Sunday, March 6, 2:00. T1

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